Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions. It was ennobled by
lying at the foot of a mountain,--called by the working-folks of the
place "the Maounting,"--which sufficiently showed that it was the
principal high land of the district in which it was situated. It lay to
the south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy stretches herself
before the Alps. To pass from the town of Tamarack on the north of the
mountain to Rockland on the south was like crossing from Coire to
Chiavenna.

There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and romance and mystery to a
place like the impending presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful
Northampton with its fair meadows and noble stream is lovely enough, but
owes its surpassing attraction to those twin summits which brood over it
like living presences, looking down into its streets as if they were its
tutelary divinities, dressing and undressing their green shrines, robing
themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, and doing penance
in the snowy shroud of winter, as if they had living hearts under their
rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children of the soil at their
feet, who grow up under their almost parental smiles and frowns. Happy
is the child whose first dreams of heaven are blended with the evening
glories of Mount Holyoke, when the sun is firing its treetops, and
gilding the white walls that mark its one human dwelling! If the other
and the wilder of the two summits has a scowl of terror in its
overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage
solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet,
companionable village.--And how the mountains love their children! The
sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any
port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces
only in the midst of their own families.